Visualist x100!!!! – My Hero Academia Season Four: Episode Seventeen

The kids return with a vengeance! Find out how Karandi and I deal with watching the kids deal with the dealing party of heroes! Complete convolution and winks abound!

Kapodaco

Now this episode was a lot more in line with what I desired from the last episode. Tone was (fairly) serious throughout, they got to the point, and there wasn’t too much filibuster for the sake of it. And the resolution set by the conflict in the last episode only spanned through half the episode! This season overall has had a serious issue with filler and expositional dialogue eating up the length of each episode, and number seventeen is the one that decides to cut it down exponentially. Brave, Hero! You finally shut up!

To continue along with a positive note (perhaps as compensation for last week’s negative overload), there are a collection of small, but cute instances in this episode that I think satiate some desire for true heroism returning to the forefront. How the heroes ended up dealing with the kids was a creatively innocent and exuberant concoction that made me smile. I don’t even enjoy those thrill-based rides, and yet I was satisfied all the same. The conversation between Endeavor and Todoroki was nice, and even Baldy’s random face-punching act wasn’t out of place. A conversation that lasted all of three lines between Bakugo and Midoriya likely ramped up the shippers insanely, simultaneously calling back to the deeper aspects of their relationship, which was nice. It seems like this is a very fan-service-y episode, though dealing with callbacks and loose ends from prior seasons as a means of strengthening interest. At this point, I’ll take it.

Modern problems require modern solutions.

In spite of all of this, there are a couple things that I wish would’ve been elaborated on better. Very close to the beginning of the episode, one of the students who was commenting for no reason talked about a “Quirk Singularity Doom” theory or something, in which as generations pass, their quirks become too strong to control, resulting in the end of true humanity. That was super interesting! Why are you just gonna leave that as a passing comment?! Is it gonna come back at some point? Why even mention something so intriguing if there’s no consequence to it? The writing overall is still somewhat artificial-feeling, as there were times I could tell when the script said, “Okay, now Bakugo talks… Okay, now Baldy talks…,” etc. I was also surprised so many jokes landed, considering up to this point basically none of them did. Bakugo laughing over the Todoroki impression by Camie was… strangely nice.

And then the episode felt it necessary to end with Aoyama shitting his pants. Great. Thanks.

Pictured: Karandi and I digesting all of these episodes (with guests).

Aoyama is kind of an interesting case here. Some tonal confusion, likely deliberate, painted him as a menace and a pal at regular intervals, only to reveal he was just trying to be nice. In hindsight… did we need almost half an episode dedicated to that? Yeah, Aoyama has basically been neglected all series and is more of a running joke than anything, but to showcase him as a…threat(?), only to have it end with a joke yet again feels a little… hostile. Perhaps a small truce with the audience for ignoring the entire U.A. cast up to this point, as plenty of students had lines and chances to establish themselves in the second half of this episode. The way they decided to implement Aoyama… Hrmm, leaning towards the negative.

A much better episode than the last, I would call it pretty good and one of the brighter moments of the bunch. Some criticism could be brought upon the “point” of the episode and the intentions behind character usage, though I think it’s somewhat alleviated by characters being more exuberant and a number of nice winks to the audience via emotional confrontations and callbacks. My expectations of this season are so low already that an episode like this is gem-like to me. They’ll probably kill it next episode… I’ll leave that phrasing ambiguous.

I know, Dad.

Karandi

Well I didn’t hate this episode, but nor am I about to sing the praises of something that feels decidedly like a transition between story beats and scatters its focus all over the place from resolving the idiocy with the kids at the provisional license exam to actually reminding us that there is in fact a class of heroes we’ve been following prior to this season and that life continues for them. That this episode ends up watchable and even delivers the occasional decent scene or line is nice but mostly it just made me realise that the strongest episode season four has delivered came from the recap episode back at the start. That’s somewhat sad though possibly a triumph for studios writing recap episodes and trying to make them watchable.

The resolution of the decision to pick a fight with a bunch of poorly disciplined children was flashy and shiny and I’m guessing someone, somewhere, thought it was heartwarming the way the characters combined their quirks to make a game in the end. The practical reality is the next day the kids are going to go back to tormenting their teacher and realistically this society is fundamentally broken when we put together everything we’ve seen about the school system over four seasons. The fact that it hasn’t entirely burned down yet is a testament to how much of a deterrent All Might really was.

Pictured: Not All Might

Like Kapodaco I found the comment about the quirks getting passed down the generations and getting stronger to be an interesting one as it does explain a lot of what we have seen and heard about the world. It’s also a little bit on the terrifying side when you think about the child in this episode that essentially has a cannon in his mouth. You would think there would be more than a passing line given to the potential end of the world but apparently not.

For the second half of the episode I will admit it was nice to see the UA kids being students at UA. The focus took awhile to settle on Aoyama and given they’ve previously implicated him as a potential traitor I found this kind of interesting. I’m not 100% satisfied that we’ve seen the last of the moments where Aoyama comes into the spotlight for ambiguous reasons, but at the same time I kind of wish he was more interesting when he was front and centre.

I think we can both agree that these two should be front and center.

So, not as negative as last week but this episode hasn’t exactly made me sing the praises of My Hero Academia again. Honestly it feels like this season is too far gone at this point to really save. And whether there is ‘good stuff’ coming as twitter will continue to insist, it won’t make me feel that the last sixteen episodes were any better.